In this excerpt, Colt first meets Sam, his golden retriever, when he, Meg, and Franny, his girlfriend, spend a morning volunteering at a local shelter:
"By the end of the morning, Colt is exhausted. Franny and Meg laugh at him. But twelve dogs have had a bit of individual attention and playtime. Zoey, in alliterative allegiance to her name, spent her recess in crazed zoomies that made them dizzy, crossing and recrossing the yard, stopping only for one bowl-draining drink of water. Pepper preferred listening, head cocked, as Meg sat with her on the grass and talked to her. Colt tried throwing the ball, but the dog ignored it, preferring instead ten minutes of belly rubs, ear scratches, and being told she was a good, good girl. And Sam broke his heart. He didn’t want to play or retrieve the ball. There was no tail wagging. To Colt, the dog gave the appearance of someone on the verge of giving up on trying to figure out a really tough math problem, one involving subtraction with the subtrahend taken permanently away, and Colt himself unable to help. When asking the universe to mitigate a situation or, at the very least to explain much less justify it, more and more he hears only its implacable silence. “Thirsty work for all of us,” Colt says, upending the last of the Dr. Pepper he’s just purchased from the machine in the office. “Please tell me, what brings a beautiful golden to a shelter anyway?” The person behind the counter answers, “You die leaving no plan for your pet, so your kid who lives in Seattle brings Sam here before he leaves for home after the funeral. Still, not the worst ending this story could have." And Franny adopts two greyhounds in this excerpt: "The Saturday after school begins, Franny brings home not one but two adult greyhounds, recently of the dog track, a male and female. Besides the shelter, she’s also been searching rescue sites since May, finalizing this adoption without telling anyone just before she moved. Their names are unknown. She tells Colt she’s going to call them Heloise and Abelard. “That’s a terrible idea,” he says. “Hell and Abe? You want literary, we can do better.” “Okay, let’s hear it.” “Romeo and Juliet?” says Colt. “No,” says Franny. “Wait! Bonnie and Clyde!” “Really, Colt? What next? Simone and Garfunkel?” The two graceful animals, having almost immediately discovered and claimed as their own Franny’s well-loved, ancient (versus antique, she specifies if asked) damask sofa with its down-stuffed seat cushions, are intertwined thereon, deeply uninterested in human conversation, fast asleep. Colt and Franny finally settle on Lucy and Desi. “Not a very literary choice after all,” Franny says. “No,” says Colt. “But what was left after we eliminated Leonard and Virginia, George and Martha, Scott and Zelda? Come on!” “If you look closely, Lucy’s coat does have a reddish tinge.” They are lovely dogs, and smart. They learn their names quickly and respond to them." You can pre-order "An Invitation to the Party" at https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/an-invitation-to-the-party/
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Vera presents Week #3 . . .the cast of "An Invitation to the Party:" Garnet's ex, Bowie, and her sister Ruby with an important concluding message from VeraQuoting brief excerpts from the novel, this week we meet Garnet's ex, Bowie, and her sister, Ruby.
Bowie: Garnet’s ex lives alone in a too-large, somewhat haphazardly rehabbed Victorian beauty with a wrap-around front porch, a porte cochere, and like many of his neighbors, a carriage house in back that has not held a carriage or a horse in almost a hundred years and presently shelters Bowie’s automobile. Today he sits in one of the porch’s four Cracker Barrel rocking chairs, bundled up in a filthy down jacket, its hood pulled up, his bible the Wall Street Journal in hand, getting his daily quota of fresh air. Though the March weather is being predictably execrable, a little adversity has not made him alter his routine. Morning means reading his WSJ on the front porch from vernal equinox through the cold, bitter end of fall, and his newspaper says spring has duly commenced. The Journal, fair, factual reportage unclouded by suspect opinion, unlike its sister New York paper which shall be nameless, that’s all he asks. And yes, he is capable of gratitude, despite claims to the contrary by Garnet. Thank the Almighty for down and fleece: how about that? Bowie knows what everyone in this place, his small town, thinks of him, not that he lets it bother him. Most people are fools, easily ignored by a man of substance like himself, a man who knows what’s what. He’s willing to admit having made the occasional miscalculation along the way—unwilling even now to call them mistakes—he’s always had his reasons. Sometimes though, watching his wife, of course he means ex-wife, her lined, set, pretty face looking straight ahead, walking his dog past the house he lives in now, he forgets what they were. And Bowie is not stupid. He may be slowly losing his mind, but he is not stupid he tells himself. Often. He does not quite understand now how he managed a law practice all those years. And some days it is an effort to make sure he has put on all the clothes necessary to appear in public without again being humiliatingly picked up on Main Street by that twerp, Officer Del Diller, and delivered in a squad car, lights flashing to Garnet, just because he’d remembered the socks but not the shoes on a rainy late February day. Some days Bowie argues with Colt, finding himself quite able to cite legal precedent. And once fairly recently they even discussed who actually gets to claim coverage under the Bill of Rights in present-day America. And who does not. But on other days Bowie is foggy on what it is a bill of rights might be, and the pursuit of happiness, cited in another founders’ document, sounds even to Colt like a race Bowie might have run as a much younger man. Ruby: Ruby is dress-up to Garnet’s dress-down. She is a kitsch-prone collector—Beanie Babies (remember them?), Hummel figurines, pewter tankards, you name it—and addicted to the shopping network. She favors pantyhose and outfits, to Garnet’s ad hoc socks and separates, and does not go out unless she has applied makeup and Giorgio. Each sister admiringly views the other as an exotic. However, Garnet sometimes regards Ruby’s Rolex and finds herself calculating the musk oxen, goats, and flocks of chickens, Heifer International could have provided third-world families. That’s what the timepiece represents to her. Then she is ashamed of herself. She loves her sister and is in no way perfect herself, in no way unsusceptible to the siren song of mammon and his baubles. Their baubles simply differ. Moreover, Garnet counts herself the lucky one in the name lottery, having never had someone she barely knows come up to her at a party and smirk drunkenly before warbling, “Garnet, it’s you” in a very bad imitation of Mr. Ray Charles. And no one has ever felt the slightest compulsion to request she refrain from taking her love to town. Then again, Thelonious Monk chose “Ruby, My Dear” rather than any less valuable alternative for the title of music that moves Garnet to tears every time she hears it. Coming next week: Meet the (other) dogs of "An Invitation to the Party" (Vera does NOT approve the coming week's subject and wishes to make it known that she strongly objected to the writer's insistence on additional canines in this manuscript. Vera says her presence was sufficient, nay, more than enough, and the reader will without doubt find the other dogs a most annoying distraction.) (She adds, it's fine with her if you skip next week. In fact, she recommends it.) "An Invitation to the Party" can be pre-ordered at: regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/an-invitation-to-the-party/ Quoting brief excerpts from the novel, this week we meet Colt, Garnet's nephew and boarder, and his daughter, Meg.
Colt "Though he’s twenty-nine, in his heart of hearts Colt feels as adrift, as unsettled as he remembers being at eighteen. He would like to be feeling that his real life has begun. Instead, he believes he lost his way somewhere between Rain telling him she was pregnant eleven years ago and today. Yes, he stuck it out, got an education, which truth to tell has not proved very useful. Yes, by working part-time during the school year, full-time summers and breaks at the construction job he still holds, he’s debt-free. He’s even managed to become and remain a part of his daughter’s life and cobbled together a mostly positive relationship with her mother. But he’d hoped by now to have a partner, a term he despises for its business-as-usual implication, but the person it represents in his mind, this unknown someone, he thinks he’d like her. A lot. He’d hoped to have a house, no, a home, by now. He loves his aunt, does not know what he’d have done without her kindness, but maybe it’s time to free them both up, break up the current stasis? Colt does not have a girlfriend. He has not had a date in, has not had sex in, what the hell, he is not going to say how long. For either one. He’ll be pinned down only to it’s been a while. If nothing else, maybe he needs to actually do something about that." Meg "Sunday evening Colt pulls into Rain’s driveway, delivering Meg to her mom after a weekend in which nothing special happened. He and Meg ate pizza with Garnet; they took Vera to the dog park, went to breakfast with their elders, and Meg to the library with Garnet. They saw a movie, its forgetful fish reminding Colt of something, of someone, finally realizing on the way home that it was Garnet’s ex, Bowie. Meg then went out for sundaes with that same uncle Bowie, the crummy weather bothering neither one. Colt and his daughter played Monopoly with Garnet, one game each evening, Colt, winning big and sorely lacking in good-sport humility, christened a “bad winner” and “glory hog” by the disdainful ladies. In other words, it was perfect. He turns off the engine and glances at his daughter. He would very much like to have her remain ten forever, his life remaining in perfect equilibrium, no looming future to scare the bejesus out of him. Nothing says happy and afraid don’t go together. That they don’t march lockstep holding each other up like the two wounded soldiers they are. Considering the fragility of happiness, aren’t we always looking back, worrying, making sure something, anything, isn’t gaining on us, on a mission to take it all away. I know, I know. Stupid. Serving only to make a person less happy, more afraid. Even so, Meg’s sweet round face, that smile her grandmother’s, all of it more than enough reason to startle awake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night thinking of all the things the world contains. Its arsenal of illness, violence, accidents. To recognize your significant powerlessness in the face of it. How do you live with that? How does anyone?" Coming next week: Garnet's ex, Bowie, and her sister, Ruby "An Invitation to the Party" can be pre-ordered at: regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/an-invitation-to-the-party/
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April 2024
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